Maintaining Choice- Electronic University Education and Diversity(上)_计算机网络论文.docVIP

Maintaining Choice- Electronic University Education and Diversity(上)_计算机网络论文 Maintaining Choice: Electronic University Education and Diversity(上)_计算机网络论文 Abstract Distance education courses are costly to prepare. Future e-universities will only be able to recoup their costs by enrolling very large numbers of students. Consequently, they will have to be global institutions. This will lead to a massive reduction in the range of content and style of course materials on offer to students. The negative effects of this could include intellectual conformity, cultural imperialism and the de-skilling of most academic lecturing staff who will be reduced to supervising students on courses prepared by others. An alternative to the monolithic e-university of the future is the development of a global market in electronic course materials at the topic level. Electronic lectures provide a low cost entry to such a market for practising academics. Using a style developed at Bournemouth University, e-lectures are easy to prepare from existing lecture materials. Traditional university lecturing is a relatively formal pedagogic mechanism so e-lectures do not require a full understanding of current learning theories, which are essential for the successful development of the more interactive aspects of university education at a distance such as online seminar discussions. It is envisaged that academic lecturing staff of the future will be able to construct a course unit’s lectures from a wide range of cheaply available e-lectures prepared by experts on each topic in the unit. Apart from academic staff thus maintaining control over the content and style of their units, e-lectures may be used in traditional, campus- based universities as well as in any future, virtual ones. Additionally, the development of a global e-lecture market can be gradual, with lecturers replacing their own materials with e-lecture ones piecemeal, thus allowing both staff and students to adjust to this no